There weren't only words in
the envelope. Alongside yellowed pages that had been yanked out of another
diary, I found four other things. A scrap of paper with the Algerian's phone
number on it. A piece of Délice black
currant candy. A hotel bill. Two movie tickets for Claire Denis' film Beau
Travail. Souvenirs? No, more like pieces of evidence. Proof that I really
did meet that man. I was 27. He was 36. Nobody in Paris knew I existed back then. But he did.
He was God. Right from the start. He was dancing. I joined him. I danced. He
loved me. I loved him. For a year and a half, he was my world, my self, my
destiny. He was it. Him. Slimane. The guy from southern Algeria, the
one with the light skin. The married man who had just left his wife. The father
of four girls. Foundry worker. Sculptor. A man with the soul of a poet. An
Arab. More of an Arab than me.

Common
wisdom says that Mitt Romney won the first debate because he was “energetic”
while the President appeared “lethargic.” It certainly destroys any
lingering myth that presidential elections are about actual policy; despite the
best efforts of the fact-checkers, impression trumps policy every time. Besides, let’s be honest: most people would rather not have a drawn-out
discussion of tax plans. Big Bird’s possible unemployment is so much more
amusing.

Overall,
the debate was about as interesting and informative as a 90 minute lecture on
macroeconomics given by a C student.

At
least the Vice Presidential Debate had some fireworks. Of course, the “policy
debate” still came down to dueling platitudes and mischaracterizations, and it
will have less impact on voters than an Election Day rainstorm over Ohio and
Pennsylvania. But it made for good television; and, honestly, that’s what
both the media and the voters really care about.

Now the focus is back on the top of the ticket. Moving forward, the worry for the candidates is that Romney’s performance was not
as dominant, and Obama’s not as bad, as many pundits have been
portraying. It isn’t entirely the media’s fault: we would all rather hear
about “Obama’s Debacle” than about “Obama’s Mediocre Performance.” But
this creates danger. Governor Romney must now deal with raised
expectations. People may now expect him to dominate each of the next two
debates in a way that he didn’t really dominate the first one. Romney’s campaign needs to dampen expectations as much as possible, lest he find
himself facing an impossible hurdle. Meanwhile, President Obama has to
avoid overreacting to his mistakes. His basic strategy was sound: be the
more likable candidate, avoid major gaffes, and let Romney make his own
mistakes. Just do it with a bit more zest.

October 15, 2012

Although it was
not the first home videogame console, the Atari VCS was the first wildly
popular one. It was affordable at the time, and it offered the flexibility of
interchangeable cartridges. The popularity of the Atari VCS--which was the
dominant system for years and remained widely used for more than a
decade--supported the creation of nearly one thousand games, many of which
established techniques, mechanics, or entire genres that continue to thrive
today on much more technologically advanced platforms. Although several companies
fielded consoles, by 1981 the Atari VCS accounted for 75 percent of home
videogame system sales. Indeed, the generic term for a videogame system in the
early 1980's was 'an Atari.'

...Obviously, the Atari VCS is a cherished relic.
Although no longer manufactured in its original form, it remains a living
fossil. An article in Time in 2001 described the console's continued
life after the turn of the century: "At '80s-themed parties it's common to
see a 2600 wired to the TV set and guests jumping at the chance to rediscover
their first video game experience." The VCS consoles have continued to
come out to play, for instance, for celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary
of the release of the system in late 2007. Just as a practice like letterpress
printing is a contemporary, ongoing activity in addition to being the dominant
method of printing from times past, the Atari VCS is admirable for its
historical role in video gaming while it remains playable and programmable
today.

Just as
shame is both productive and corrosive of queer identity, the switching point
between stage fright and stage presence, between being a wallflower and being a
diva, so too is it simultaneously productive and corrosive of queer
revaluations of dignity and worth.

In his book
about the banishment of sex from contemporary queer politics, The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner
argues that we need to “develop an ethical response to the problem of shame.”
“The difficult question is not: how do we get rid of our sexual shame?” Warner
writes. “The question, rather, is this: what will we do with our shame? And the
usual response is: pin it on someone else.”

How does this
work, performatively? Sedgwick explains: “The absence of an explicit verb from
‘Shame on you’ records the place in which an I, in conferring shame, has
effaced itself and its own agency. Of course the desire for self-effacement is
the defining trait of–what else?–shame. So the very grammatical truncation of
‘Shame on you’ marks it as a product of a history out of which an I, not
withdrawn is projecting shame–toward
another I, an I deferred, that has yet and with difficulty to come into being,
if at all, in the place of the shamed second person.

Saying
“Shame on you” or “For shame” casts shame onto another that is both felt to be
one’s own, and, at the same time, disavowed as one’s own. But in those already
shamed, the shame-prone, the shame is not so easily shed or so simply
projected: It manages also to persist as one’s own. This can lend it the
capacity for articulating collectivities of the shamed. Warner explains,

"A relation to others [in queer contexts] begins in an
acknowledgement of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself.
Shame is bedrock. Queers can be abusive, insulting, and vile toward one
another, but because abjection is understood to be the shared condition they
also know how to communicate through such comradery a moving and unexpected
form of generosity. No one is beneath its reach, not because it prides itself
on generosity but because it prides itself on nothing. The rule is: get over
yourself. Put a wig on before you judge. And the corollary is that you stand to
learn most from the people you think are beneath you. At its best, this ethic
cuts against every form of hierarchy you could bring into the room. Queer
scenes are the true salons des refuses,
where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their
common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they
now recognize as false morality."

The sad thing about the contemporary politics of gay and
lesbian pride is that it works in precisely the opposite way: It calls for a
visibility predicated on homogeneity and on excluding anyone who does not
conform to norms that are taken to be the very morality we should be happy to
accept as the onus of our so-called maturity. It thus sees shame as
conventional indignity rather than the affective substrate necessary to the
transformation of one’s distinctiveness into a queer kind of dignity. This is
why the queer culture of the 1960s, made visible in Warhol’s films, is so
necessary a reminder of what we need to know how.

October 09, 2012

There
are few things in the world that better evidence the importance of social
learning—the I’ll Have What She’s Having (IHWSH) effect of our book of the same title—than democratic elections, particularly presidential elections. At the same
time, they reveal our culture’s deep ambivalence about IHWSH and copying.

We
tell ourselves that pursuing our democratic rights means each and every one of
us having our own private say on who should be leading us and spending our tax
dollars, but the lengths we go to in order to ensure that the votes we cast are
indeed the votes of free and independently-minded individuals suggest that we
suspect that human nature might be working in the other direction. Consider the
privacy of the polling booth, the elaborate machinery we develop to reduce human
error (and the complex human protocols to ensure there is none), the
(debatable) limits on campaign expenditure, the labyrinthine procedural legal
frameworks within which we manage the Great Big Vote.

Indeed, many countries go further: for example, the UK is one of those
countries in which exit polls may not be published while the polls are still
open. Germany and India are unlikely bedfellows, but both are tougher still—they
have strict limits on the publication of opinion polls of any sort in the latter
stages of elections.

And
rightly so. Whether or not lawmakers behind this legal framework realized what
they were doing, both of these types of banned information syntheses provide
the rest of us with an example to follow—in uncertain decision-landscapes (as
the jargon has it), they provide very good proxies for “what she’s having.”

Indeed,
despite our best efforts, support for political parties and candidates is a
very social phenomenon. Hence the heavy use in our politics of rallies (large
gatherings of enthusiasts which give the impression of popularity), celebrity
and VIP endorsements (former Presidents and Hollywood A-listers, please form an
orderly line), and our obsession with the ever-elusive “momentum” that spin doctors
seek for their candidate—momentum is
a reflection of which way other people (including the media pundits) are
shifting in their views and intentions. Again, a great shorthand for working
out where to land your own vote.

Hence
also the notion of “class” (i.e. group or tribal) politics and political views
as a badge of shared social identity. Indeed, the depth of political divide,
which the last few years in Washington has been characterized, is a reflection
of a larger tribalization of opinions and culture across the US. As Bill
Bishop’s excellent The Big Sort points
out, we have sorted ourselves out into mutually misunderstanding and
mistrusting electorates.

Another
big clue to the importance of #IHWSH in shaping US politics is the clustering of opinions and positions around
issues— Low Taxes, Small State, Gun Control, and Right to Life all seem to go
together because they have come to reflect a group identity. Most discussions
or debates on these issues immediately defaults to the preset position of those
involved; sometimes, as Bishop points out, even encouraging a more extreme
position thanks to what social psychologists call the “risky shift.”

Oscar Wilde was mostly right when he observed,“…most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's
opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

The
difference between Oscar and us is that we don’t see this as essentially a bad
thing (he despaired of the common man’s lack of originality). In our view, in politics
as in life, IHWSH is large part of how we decide, when we’re left to our own
individual—social—devices.

The
belief that heterosexual love was the most natural thing in the world was
accorded widespread acceptance and approval as the twentieth century
progressed. Even so, the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis soon called the
notion into question.

In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality published in 1905,
Sigmund Freud argued the probability that heterosexuality was not a given:

Thus
from the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by
men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a
self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical
nature.

Far from being natural in
biological or biochemical terms, therefore, heterosexuality and homosexuality
were, in Freud’s submission, functions of an individual’s personal psychic
makeup.

In his discussion of “polymorphously perverse” infantile bisexuality, Freud
argued that heterosexuality was the result of a long and arduous psychic
apprenticeship extending far back into earliest childhood. This assertion
subsequently appeared elsewhere in his work, where he argued that “normal
sexuality too depends upon a restriction in the choice of object.” In other
words, although never going to the lengths that psychiatry once had and
dismissing heterosexuality as a pathological condition, psychoanalysis was at
pains to show that it was not an inborn characteristic. Analysis of every
single complex—not least the Oedipus variety—tended to confirm this. Despite
broad dissemination and awareness of psychoanalytical theory, however, the vast
majority of the public (and most psychoanalysts) remained unaware of the notion
that heterosexuality or, indeed, homosexuality was an acquired condition.

October 02, 2012

This week's Election Tuesday post is by Robert Pollin, author of Back to Full Employment. Pollin tackles the issue of job creation, claiming that the real discussion about rebuilding the economy around job opportunity creation will have to come not from the candidates, but from an engaged citizenry.

As a result of the 2008-09 Wall
Street crash and Great Recession, employment conditions in the United States
have been worse than at any time since the 1930s Depression. As of the most recent August data, the official
unemployment rate is 8.1 percent. A better
official measure—which includes people who have been discouraged from looking
for work and those taking part-time jobs (sometimes very part-time) when they
wanted full time—puts unemployment as of August at 14.7 percent. That is 23 million people, nearly double the
combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles.

Based on
historical experience, a U.S. president running for reelection would be tossed
out by voters in the face of such disastrous employment figures. But polls show that President Obama is
maintaining a small but firm edge over Mitt Romney, and that, if anything, the
margin is widening with time.

In part, we
can attribute this to both Romney’s ineptitude as a candidate and to the
hard-right politics advanced by Tea Party Republicans. But even accounting for these factors, I
would still venture that, while most voters do not believe that Obama and the
Democrats offer anything close to a coherent plan for overcoming mass
unemployment, they also understand that the Republicans—with their full
throttle embrace of an austerity agenda—have even less to offer.

The
situation was different during the 2008 Presidential campaign. At that time, Obama’s “hope” mantra conveyed,
if only vaguely, that he had a serious platform for counteracting the financial
crisis and recession. The fact is, Obama
did indeed have a plan and he managed to implement significant parts of it soon
after taking office in 2009. His big
initiatives were the $800 billion stimulus program and the auto industry bailout. For all their deficiencies, these programs
did succeed to a substantial extent. The
problem was that the full magnitude of the financial collapse was beyond what
the Obama team had estimated (and, full disclosure, beyond what I myself had initially
calculated). In addition, Obama gave himself little room to maneuver beyond
these initial actions, primarily because he kept trying too hard to avoid
offending the Wall Street crowd.

The moment
cries out for serious discussions throughout the country on how to dig out of
the ditch Wall Street has shoved the economy, and how to rebuild the economy
around a commitment to creating decent job opportunities for everyone. Don’t expect to hear much about this during
the rest of the campaign. The real
discussion will have to come from the bottom up, from an engaged citizenry,
pushing to create the foundations of a decent U.S. society.

About a month ago, news outlets reported that the music
streaming app, Grooveshark, had been pulled from Google Play (Google’s App
distribution service) for violation of its copyright infringement
policies. The app and its related online
service allow users to upload songs they own to Grooveshark’s servers. From there the songs can be streamed to
anyone with access to the app or to Grooveshark’s online site, creating a sort
of on demand radio populated by content uploaded by users.

There are, of course, a number of legal
problems with the service and the technology upon which it is built, not least
of which are claims by the music industry that Grooveshark and its parent
company (Escape Media Group) are engaging in widespread contributory
infringement of copyright. Claims by
Grooveshark that it is an internet service provider (much like YouTube) and
therefore protected from contributory liability by what is arguably a far-reaching interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “Safe Harbor”
clause may have found some sympathy in the courts, but to this observer, the
deeper issue is how technologies like Grooveshark (looking a lot like Napster
circa 1999 without the download option) continue to have traction among users
who have “grown up” with industry-sponsored lessons on the “rights” and
“wrongs” of digital copyright.

Perhaps
what the industry fails to see is that user practices in the consumption of
digital content are becoming fixed and reproduced by a matrix of other digital
technologies and services that quite literally make an argument for leaky
content. Why should a video stay on your
phone if it can immediately go up on YouTube? There’s an app for that. Why should
your music stay on your hard drive when you can upload it to the cloud? There’s an app for that, too. A host of digital technologies invite users
to leak their content out of their original vessels onto other platforms. The social web is built on that premise. The “upload” option has become not only a
technical standard on digital devices but also a cultural norm among many users
(especially younger ones).

In my opinion,
Grooveshark is not like YouTube enough to warrant “Safe Harbor” protection and
the music industry is likely to make that argument eventually stick. Google may, at least, be legally
vindicated for removing the app. However, Grooveshark is part of a technological ecology that invites sharing,
that generally forgoes questions of copyright for after the fact and that
builds business models upon an upload culture. For the music industry, that will be considerably harder to curb.